Was that addressed to you or me? Either way I think we are in agreement.

When Google was touting "don't be evil" it was said and heard as "don't be
like Microsoft" and at the time it was true. Also the company was not politically
connected to anyone at the time.

Now ... the idea that Google, Facebook, and Twitter now have the power to
be "thought police" and have made it clear that they're actively interested
in abusing that power ... that takes things to a whole new level. Any wrongthink
is labeled "hate speech" or "not advertiser friendly" or whatever, and either
removed or demonetized.

Every now and then I get pissed off at Google (who are Hitler now) and try
another search engine, only to be disappointed with the results a few days
later and switch back to Google (who, as I mentioned, are Hitler).

Surprisingly, over the past two weeks I have been using DuckDuckGo and I
haven't switched back to Google (yet?). The quality of their search results
has improved greatly. I recommend giving it a try.

(Those who have been paying attention might remember that this was my experience
with T-Mobile as well ... at some point they turned the corner from "unusable"
to "usable" and eventually they got to "pretty darn good")

2017-09-in-the-next-day-or-two from Ragnar Danneskjold

I have tried them all and they all suck.

Well yes, everything sucks at some level, but if you're trying to balance
the quality of search results with the level of non-Hitlerianism, you may
be pleasantly surprised at how decent DuckDuckGo has become.

Has anyone tried Google Duo yet? Looks like they did a decent job but I'm having trouble coming up with a reason why anyone would install it. At least it works on both Android and iOS, which puts it a notch above Facetime, but that's about it.

Somehow my family started using Viber, a text & video message client. Available for Iphone, Android and Linux apple, or Windows desktops.You can set up text messaging groups, but it does not have group video.

I don't think the Linux desktop works as it should, it seems to have a problems syncing. Although you can download it tech support said Linux is not supported.

I think these "real-time" voip/videophone apps are completely overrated.
Bandwidth and user experience are significantly improved by simply bringing
back the good old "push-to-talk" button, like on ham radios.

I've tried Duo, mostly because it does work on both iPhone and Android.
Seems to do the job. Haven't used it for anything beyond testing. I'm not
against it... it drastically simplifies everything... but I haven't had a
need to chat with people like that much.

I experienced something rather unusual today, that will sound like a fabrication
to you, I suspect.

I needed to look something up for Python, so I googled it (as I've googled
countless other things for Python, Java, C/C++, and all the other various
and sundry languages I've had to use over the years). There wasn't anything
special about this particular search, but... it got weird. The search results,
within the browser, tilted back, revealing a black background behind the results,
and a question appeared at the top of this back-backgrounded mystery: "It
looks like you speak our language. Would you like to play a game?"

Intrigued, I clicked the button indicating that I'm interested.

The search results then fell into the black background, disappearing, to
reveal what looked like a terminal desktop within the browser. From there,
very terse instructions (something like
'type [help] for assistance') on how to work this environment were made available,
and that was that. 'ls' showed the contents of the folder I was in. I could
log in, which would make it possible to return to this environment later if
I wanted (so I did). I could also type in something that would give me a
programming challange.

So, I did. And it created something like a folder in which my challange
was made available. I had 48 hours to finish it... a simple Java or Python
programming challange that only took me a few minutes (it showed as 2 hours,
because I had to walk away to do some other stuff before I could finish it,
since this all happened at work after all). Ran it through their verifier...
passed... then submitted it to them. Challange complete... and I can pick
up another one if I want (which I haven't done yet).

I thought, cool, I guess I stumbled into an easter
egg. So I went to our intern and said, 'try this', and gave him the URL.